5 Ways to Optimize Your Core Web Vitals and Enhance User Experience

Boost your Core Web Vitals (CWVs), achieve scores that will make Google happy, and run laps around your competitors. 

It's no secret that maintaining excellent Core Web Vitals (CWV) is crucial for both user experience and search engine rankings. After all, Google uses these metrics to gauge the quality of user experience on your site, so it's vital to stay on top of them.

As Mike Lively, SVP of Engineering at Slickdeals, says about Core Web Vitals on an episode of The Frictionless Experience:

But, many businesses struggle with understanding and optimizing their CWV performance due to the mystery of unraveling the factors (and culprits) of downward-trending scores, and limited insights offered by commonly used tools.

Fortunately, there are pro strategies you can use to demystify your CWVs without the grind and guesswork and achieve CWV scores that Google will praise by pushing you higher in their search result listings.

And since good CWV scores mean the user experience is good, those frictionless experiences can even increase conversions. But don't just take our word for it - research confirms it.

Here are five ways to optimize your Core Web Vitals and smoke the competition.

1. Leverage Comprehensive Monitoring Tools

With budgets tight and resources limited, many businesses often rely on free tools like Web Page Test, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights to monitor their CWV performance.

While these tools are helpful, they often provide only a snapshot of your site's performance at a given time and often based on a single session. Also, since these methods rely on synthetic testing or lab data, which simulates user interactions in controlled environments, they don't accurately depict what your real users are experiencing.

So, to better optimize your CWVs and user experiences, use a real-user monitoring (RUM) solution in addition to synthetic testing.

RUM can identify performance bottlenecks that might go undiscovered by synthetic monitoring because it collects user input data from actual users as they interact with your webpages. This provides a more accurate picture of your site's CWVs.

But, implementing RUM comes with challenges, and RUM alone is not a magic remedy to diagnose ailing CWV scores and bring them back to good health.

To go deep beneath your CWV scores for more detailed insights into the root causes of your CWV scores and how to fix them, consider using a more advanced solution like VitalScope. 

By employing comprehensive monitoring, you can better understand how your CWV scores evolve and address potential issues before they escalate.

2. Benchmark Against Competitors

Understanding where your site stands in relation to competitors is crucial in maintaining a competitive edge. 

To benchmark your Core Web Vitals against competitors, you can use a tool like Google's Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX). This report from Google uses real user data (but only from Chrome, not all user sessions from all browsers) to provide information about any public site with enough traffic.

Example CrUX Dashboard: CrUX Dashboard. (n.d.). https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux/dashboard

Using this data, you can conduct a comparative analysis and manually compile your own competitor analysis reports to benchmark your CWVs and user experiences against the competition.

But keep in mind, while CrUX offers some comparative features, free tools offer limited benchmarking capabilities and might not be as comprehensive as you'd like. This can leave you guessing about your site's performance compared to others and how to improve your competitive positioning.

If you were to use CrUX or similar, free tools, you would also have to run dozens of checks across different pages and different competitors to track that information. That’s a lot of manual effort! And it’s still only a snapshot in time based on a single session.

Alternatively, you could use a more advanced solution like Blue Triangle to easily create benchmarks and check key competitors across multiple pages and search terms based on thousands or millions of sessions for a more accurate performance comparison over time.

3. Identify and Address Root Causes

One of the biggest challenges with traditional solutions like PageSpeed Insights, APM, or DX tools, is their inability to pinpoint the root causes of CWV issues.

They often provide generalized recommendations that may not effectively resolve your unique CWV problems. For example: 

• Improve Load Speed: Compress images, leverage browser caching, and minimize HTTP requests to boost page load times and enhance Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
• Enhance Interactivity: Reduce JavaScript execution time and prioritize essential scripts to lower Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and ensure a responsive user experience.
• Stabilize Layout: Specify sizes for media, avoid content shifts, and optimize font loading to reduce unexpected layout changes and improve Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

While this advice isn't incorrect, it doesn't give you the full picture either. It's missing vital information offering detailed diagnostics, showing exactly why your CWV scores are declining and how to fix them.

To identify and address the root causes of poor Core Web Vital scores, use a diagnostic tool like VitalScope that can identify the root cause of CWV issues to pinpoint specific issues affecting your CWVs and analyze your performance data.

With this information, your development team can proactively implement targeted fixes rather than guessing and experimenting. This targeted approach saves time and resources while improving overall site performance and user experience.

Commenting on CWVs, Nick Paladino says:

"What I find very cool about Core Web Vitals is that it's pretty much the first time we've been able to quantify the user experience. Because the interactivity of INP matters a lot. The stability of the site matters a lot. And that's what helps us to make sure that we're doing right for our customers."

4. Track Performance Trends Over Time

Improving CWVs is not a one-time task but an ongoing continuous improvement process. To manage and optimize your CWVs effectively, you need to track performance trends over time.

To track your Core Web Vitals performance trends over time, utilize readily available performance monitoring tools like Google Pagespeed Insights.

This tool can help you assess competitors' websites and benchmark your own. It provides a report that grades your website on factors like page speed and user experience and offers general improvement tips.

But, PageSpeed Insights does not provide historical data to easily trend your CWVs over time. In fact, it only provides you with a moment-in-time snapshot based on a single session.

Tracking your Core Web Vitals over time is crucial for several reasons:

• Identify Long-Term Trends: Monitoring your CWVs over time helps you identify patterns and trends in your site’s performance, allowing you to spot gradual improvements or declines and make informed decisions for continuous optimization.
• Detect and Address Issues Early: Regular tracking enables you to detect performance issues before they significantly impact user experience or SEO. Early detection allows for quicker remediation, preventing minor problems from escalating.
• Measure Impact of Changes: By tracking Core Web Vitals over time, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your optimization efforts and understand how changes to your site affect performance, ensuring that your strategies are working as intended.

So, you can configure regular performance reports to routinely receive visualizations of how your metrics change over time. In this case, however, while automated reports will deliver a snapshot of performance, tracking the data will be manual.

In contrast, Blue Triangle provides historical CWV data and trend analysis up to two years, allowing you to easily monitor improvements or declines in your scores. This continuous daily tracking helps you make informed decisions and maintain a consistently high level of performance.

On an episode of The Frictionless Experience, Kenny Goldshvartz, Digital Strategy and Solutions Guru at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, says, “We definitely do that,” when asked if he tracks and trends CWV performance over time (and against competitors).

He explains: “So, you guys have helped us get that set up a while back…we have been able to standardize Core Web Vitals around how we actually monitor our site.”

Kenny continues:

“That's honestly one of the cool things that Google has done is they've started to standardize how web performance is measured everywhere to where now people are becoming aware of how important this is. Or before this, my life was incredibly difficult, you know, trying to figure out why performance is impactful. And Google has done a nice job of spreading that story throughout the industry. So it's nice to be able to measure those.”

5. Link Business Metrics with Core Web Vitals

Optimizing CWVs shouldn't just be about achieving green scores on a report. It's important to understand how these metrics impact your business outcomes.

On an episode of The Frictionless Experience, co-host Nick Paladino described each CWV as "a trinity of user experience" that all teams, even business leaders, can understand and get behind to ensure frictionless experiences.

And as the Google Chrome Dev Team shares why popular brands invest in Core Web Vitals:

"Regardless of the amount of time spent, decision-makers should treat this as a long-term investment into the growth of their business. Delivering a fast and seamless navigation experience delights users and helps turn them into loyal and returning customers. For product managers, performance should be an important criteria that defines the quality and success of new product features. And product excellence and working on interesting challenges improves developer satisfaction as well."

So, by understanding how CWV affects conversion rates and revenue, you can better prioritize optimization efforts and align them with your business goals. It can also prevent teams from making changes that could hurt conversions in order to chase a green score with Google.

Create Crave-Worthy CWV Scores That Even Google Can't Resist

Maintaining excellent Core Web Vitals is essential for user experience and search engine rankings. Ultimately, Google - and your customers - will reward you for having best-in-class CWVs.

And you can achieve that by:

• Gaining deeper insights into your CWV performance.
• Benchmarking against competitors.
• Identifying root causes of issues.
• Tracking trends over time.
• Connecting CWVs to revenue.

This comprehensive approach not only enhances your site's performance but also ensures that your CWV optimization efforts are strategic and effective.